Campus Stories - Art & Art History

Alumna and others with Stanford ties win validation for their work on Oscar night
Leadership

Alumna and others with Stanford ties win validation for their work on Oscar night

On Sunday, Feb. 28, Stanford alumna Shermeen Obaid-Chinoy took home her second Oscar after winning Best Documentary Short for her film, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. But Obaid-Chinoy, an alumna of both the International Policy Studies (‘03) and Communications (‘04) programs at Stanford, won more than a gold statuette and bragging rights….

Read more
Constructive Interference: Tauba Auerbach and Mark Fox
Campus Stories

Constructive Interference: Tauba Auerbach and Mark Fox

Constructive Interference at the Anderson Collection at Stanford University celebrates the accomplishments of two Stanford alumni artists: Tauba Auerbach, who earned her bachelor of arts in visual studies in 2003, and Mark Fox, who earned his master of fine arts in art practice in 1988. The exhibition opened in September 2015 and was timed to…

Read more
Contemporary Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn
Leadership

Contemporary Perspectives on the Battle of the Little Bighorn

Stanford senior Sarah Sadlier’s interest in Professor Scott Sagan’s Sophomore College summer seminar on the Battle of Little Bighorn in 2013 was personal. Sadlier, a Minneconjou Lakota Sioux, knew she had ancestors at the Little Bighorn. When plans for the Cantor exhibition Red Horse: Drawings of the Battle of the Little Bighorn grew out of…

Read more
Warrior’s view of the Battle of the Little Bighorn on display at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center
Campus Stories

Warrior’s view of the Battle of the Little Bighorn on display at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center

A rare exhibition of 12 drawings by acclaimed artist Red Horse, a Sioux warrior who fought against George Armstrong Custer and the U.S. Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, is on display at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center through May 9. Exhibition of 12 drawings by Red Horse, a Minneconjou Lakota Sioux…

Read more
Stanford Library Blog: Opern-Typen: opera meets the comics
Campus Stories

Stanford Library Blog: Opern-Typen: opera meets the comics

Opern-Tÿpen consists of six volumes of chromolithographic plates depicting scenes from 54 operas popular in 19th century Germany. Each opera plot has been distilled into a mere six frames, with liberally adapted accompanying text. The visual charms of Opern-Typen are evident. The plates reveal a sophisticated understanding of the effective use of line, gesture, and composition…

Read more
Still from the film My Aleppo features a girl facing a gate with a for sale sign
Leadership

Stanford alumna wins international award for her thesis documentary about Syrian refugees

Melissa Langer, 2015 MFA graduate of Stanford’s Documentary Film and Video Program, recently won the IDFA Award for Best Student Documentary for her thesis film, My Aleppo. The film, which chronicles the experience of a Syrian refugee family that relocated to Pretoria, South Africa, was one of 15 films in eight categories to win awards in…

Read more
Artist Rick Lowe walking in front of row houses
Leadership

Artist Rick Lowe is Stanford Haas Center’s 2016 Distinguished Visitor

Artist and MacArthur Foundation grant recipient Rick Lowe will visit Stanford over winter quarter as this year’s Mimi and Peter E. Haas Distinguished Visitor. On Feb. 4, Lowe will deliver the Haas Center for Public Service’s Distinguished Visitor Lecture, titled “Redefining Art in the Social Context.” During his time on campus he will also lead seminars…

Read more
Cantor Arts Center spotlights Richard Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks
Leadership

Cantor Arts Center spotlights Richard Diebenkorn’s sketchbooks

For the very first time, the complete sketchbooks of the great American artist Richard Diebenkorn are available to view. The Cantor Arts Center recently launched a new website that gives access to the museum’s collection of 29 sketchbooks by Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), a renowned artist celebrated as both a central figure in the Bay Area…

Read more
Stanford students take listeners on a voyage of discovery
Campus Stories

Stanford students take listeners on a voyage of discovery

While studying “sky burials” in Mongolia, Reade Levinson amassed 20 hours of recordings, including interviews with Tibetan Buddhist lamas, conservation biologists and vulture experts, and the sound of dogs barking, monks praying and cars honking. Levinson, a senior majoring in Earth systems, spent last summer researching the funeral practice, in which monks place corpses –…

Read more
Happy 2016!
Leadership

Happy 2016!

With the opening of the McMurtry Building, the new home for the Department of Art & Art History, we reached a milestone in the university’s ongoing commitment to building programs, curricula, and resources in the arts. The new building provides an architecturally exciting and inspiring home for the department, allowing it to expand its programmatic…

Read more
Studio 2
Campus Stories

Studio 2

Two men in a photo studio taking a picture of a Chinese ceramic horse.
Leadership

Cantor Arts Center digitizes collection for online database

Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center has completed a 6-year project to make its collection accessible online. Students, faculty, scholars and the general public can now visit the museum’s website, type in a title, artist, theme or other search criteria, and see high-quality digital images of the majority of the 45,000-plus objects in the collection. Partial inventories…

Read more
Front of a modern library in a desert town.
Leadership

Stanford photography instructor’s work in national spotlight

ROBERT DAWSON, instructor of photography in the Department of Art & Art History, spent 21 years photographing public libraries across the United States. Now, his photos will get a national spotlight. The Library of Congress recently announced the acquisition of Dawson’s entire archive from the project “Public Library: An American Commons.” The archive, acquired through…

Read more
Storytelling scroll in the conservation lab.
Campus Stories

In the Conservation Lab of Stanford University Libraries, every story has a happy ending

Each story begins with the arrival of a university treasure – a rare book, map, serial or manuscript that needs repair, or a one-of-a-kind object that needs a custom-made box. Like all artisans, Stanford’s conservators have a deep appreciation and respect for precious objects rare to modern, from a first edition On the Origin of…

Read more
Woman handling fishing net artifact.
Campus Stories

New Stanford exhibition highlights power of reinterpretation, consultation with Native American communities

In the late 1890s, the entrepreneur and former lieutenant governor of California, John R. Daggett, assembled an ethnographic collection of objects to illustrate the lives of Hupa, Karuk and Yurok communities in Northern California. Earlier he had served as commissioner for California’s pavilion at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, where exhibits showcased material…

Read more
[wpbb-if post:acf type="image" name="image" size="thumbnail" display="alt"]Color photo of woman
Campus Stories

“Comma And…”

Last winter quarter, Stanford undergraduate students in any discipline or major were invited to submit new work for the Department of Art & Art History’s second annual undergraduate juried art exhibition titled Comma And… . After much discussion and deliberation, a jury whittled down the selections and made their final recommendations of 27 works from 20 students….

Read more